Midsommar: A Review

People have been giving Midsommar great reviews. It’s been called the scariest film of the year. On the basis of that, I went and saw it with high expectations. I was thoroughly disappointed.

In the film, four Americans go to an isolated Swedish community. Unknown to them, they are being brought there to be used in ritualistic sex and violent sacrifices. My problem with the film is that the characters have no depth, and I (as the viewer) was not made to care for any of them. Each was extremely shallow and had little to no personality.

The main protagonist, Dani, is scared and pathetic from the very beginning. As the film opens, she is calling her parents to make sure they’re OK. They don’t take the call because they’re asleep. The next day, her sister kills the parents and herself in a murder-suicide. Dani is thereby plunged further into her own neurotic hell. There’s little more to her overall character than being a nervous paranoid waste who clings to her boyfriend.

Dani’s boyfriend, Christian, has arguably less substance. His whole thing is being passive. Dani clings to him, and he uses her as an excuse to avoid his schoolwork. His friend Mark is telling him to break up with her, that she’s crazy and belongs in a psychiatric ward. But, since her family died, he needs to be the “good guy” and can’t break up with her.

There’s little to Mark’s character other than being an asshole. All he seemed to do was try to get laid and tell Christian to break up with Dani. Josh, the other member of the travelling party, has the least depth. The only thing to him is that he’s devoted to his studies and his research is the catalyst for the trip.

The visuals and effects were not scary or shocking. The film was eerie for a while; the Americans and Brits were disappearing one by one, and each time it smelled of murder. I’ve always felt that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see. Near the end of the film, we see what happened to the people who disappeared and it was anticlimactic. The film seemed to go for shock value a lot of the time; it featured violence, sex, incest, and food contaminated with pubic hair and menstrual blood. In the theatre I was in, people were laughing half the time. It was just silly. People have likened this to 1973’s The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy. And there were some plot similarities, but The Wicker Man told a good story with interesting characters. Midsommar didn’t.

I was extremely disappointed and wouldn’t recommend it.